As a girl growing up in landlocked Kunming in south China, Nadiyana Na heard a story about a woman who lived alone on a boat in the Caribbean. “She woke up every day and climbed the mast to dive into this very blue sea for her morning bathe,” Nadiyana, 27, tells me. “For years I wanted to be that girl.” When Nadiyana met and fell in love with Mark Farnworth, 31, a young man from Preston who was teaching English as a foreign language at a school in Kunming, a sticker on the head of his bed called to mind Nadiyana’s childhood preoccupation. Illustrated with pictures of dolphins and tropical islands, the sticker read: “Do You Want to Sail the World With Me?”
“It was an advert recruiting sailing crew,” explains Mark. “I’d seen it on a lamp-post in Thailand and liked the look of it. But for Nadiyana it was fate.”
